How Eric Trump Became One of Crypto's Greatest Evangelists — WSJ

By Vicky Ge Huang

Eric Trump wasn't always a crypto bro. He says banks made him this way.

In early 2021, not long after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, several banks that the Trumps did business with cut them off, shutting down hundreds of accounts for the family's businesses without citing an explicit reason, Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump Organization went scrambling, scattering millions across accounts at regional banks before eventually migrating to a new bank that he declined to name.

"At that time, I realized how fragile the financial system was and how easily it could be weaponized against you," Trump said, adding that he believed that the decisions were political.

Banks say they don't close accounts for political reasons, but the issue of "debanking" has become a rallying cry in conservative circles, where criticism of lenders intensified after banks embraced diversity policies in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020. Both conservatives and crypto firms have accused banks of denying them services on political or religious grounds, and Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has said banks should stop what she described as discriminatory practices.

The experience fueled the Trumps' interest in the cryptocurrency world, long hailed by true believers as a place where banks don't call the shots on who can have accounts and how they move their money.

Eric Trump, executive vice president at the Trump Organization, has been at the forefront of the first family's rapid entry into the business in the president's second term. The Trumps have built substantial interests in bitcoin mining and acquisition and various other crypto tokens. A stake in one firm, World Liberty Financial, was recently valued at $4.5 billion.

Democrats and critics outside the government say the first family's huge foray into crypto poses major conflicts of interest — especially as President Trump lightens regulations on the industry. The Trumps say the efforts are separate from the president's official business. "I literally have nothing to do with Washington, D.C.," Eric said.

Now, President Trump has made the issue of debanking a central point of his administration, galvanizing support from a wide range of conservative groups, lawmakers and crypto companies.

The push culminated in an executive order this month that directs regulators to investigate whether banks discriminate on political or religious grounds, and punish those found to have done so.

Meanwhile, the Trump Organization has sued Capital One, one of the banks that dropped it, alleging the accounts were closed for political reasons. The company denied any political motives. In general, banking executives say they often can't be specific on reasons for closing accounts but have noted that they faced regulatory pressure in the past to avoid customers that could expose them to reputational risks.

Bricks and mortar

A decade ago, there was no world in which Trump imagined himself working in crypto. He is a self-proclaimed "bricks-and-mortar guy," who once shared his father's early skepticism of bitcoin.

Trump, 41 years old, helms the family's real-estate empire and oversees about 25 new hotel, golf course, residential and commercial building projects. The father of two says he got his start in the family business at 11, pouring concrete slabs and doing tile work. These days, he wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and goes to bed at 10 p.m. He never drinks coffee and is typically coiffed and clad in a suit. He said he finds joy in obsessing over every detail of the Trump properties. "Real estate is my baby," he said.

Golf-industry executive Tom Bennison, a personal friend of President Trump for decades, said he has watched the younger Trump gain skill rapidly. "He took the reins of a big, diversified, multibillion-dollar company with 20,000-plus employees" and has made it stronger, Bennison said.

Trump's office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan is adorned with memorabilia from his real-estate work, such as a plaque for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League, which has tournaments on Trump courses. There are also many tributes to the family's political rise: A framed electoral map from 2016 has a note in black marker that reads "Great job, Eric! Thanks, Dad" while on a wall in front of his desk is a painting of the famous moment when Trump, bloodied after an assassination attempt, raised his fist in the air.

The decor does little to convey his newfound enthusiasm for crypto, a world much more abstract than real estate or politics.

Trump started warming to the industry during President Trump's second presidential campaign, he said. Everywhere he went, crypto insiders complained that the Biden administration was using regulatory pressure to cut off their companies' access to banking services.

"This whole system was weaponized against them, no different than it had been weaponized against us for different reasons," Trump said.

Crypto community

Some of Trump's smartest friends were into crypto. Digital assets seemed a good hedge against physical investments — portable, easily traded and immune to fire or flood.

The hours spent in the courtroom during his father's 2024 criminal hush-money trial allowed plenty of time to ponder the situation. Many of the family's crypto ventures were in progress around that time, and World Liberty Financial — the family's flagship crypto firm — launched in September and soon introduced a token called WLFI as well as a stablecoin, a type of coin with a 1:1 link to the dollar.

World Liberty said in March that it had sold $550 million of WLFI to investors, including the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who is the subject of a civil fraud lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that was paused earlier this year. In June, it received a $100 million investment from a United Arab Emirates-based company called Aqua 1 Foundation, which had virtually no industry presence before its investment in World Liberty.

More recently, publicly traded crypto-payments firm ALT5 Sigma sold $1.5 billion in shares to acquire WLFI tokens and appointed Trump as a director on the company's board.

Ethics lawyers have lambasted the Trump family's crypto endeavors as an unprecedented blurring of the lines between the president's business interests and his presidential power.

"What Donald Trump is doing with crypto is the essence of corruption, because you have the man who is ultimately in charge of regulating the industry, who has vast financial interests in multiple dimensions of that industry, he can't help but make decisions that impact his own pockets," said Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar during the Obama administration.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the "media's continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible" and that "neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

Bitcoin rhapsody

In December, Eric Trump flew to Abu Dhabi for his first appearance at a major bitcoin conference. There, he rhapsodized about bitcoin and met Mike Ho, chief strategy officer of bitcoin miner Hut 8. The publicly traded company would soon strike a deal with Trump's yet-to-be-launched data center company to form American Bitcoin, which specializes in bitcoin mining, the process of performing complex computational feats to obtain the currency.

Trump, who is described as the co-founder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, owns a 9.3% stake in the company, according to a recent filing.

Anthony Scaramucci, a first-term adviser to President Trump whose investment firm SkyBridge Capital has been investing in crypto since 2020, said Eric Trump isn't a casual crypto fan. "He's read the bitcoin white paper. He's done a tremendous amount of homework," said Scaramucci.

Among the Trump family's crypto ventures, none has generated as much controversy as the $TRUMP memecoin. Launched just three days before President Trump took office, the token reached a peak market cap of nearly $15 billion, though it has now fallen to around $1.7 billion. It is unclear how the family splits its memecoin earnings with its partners.

Even seasoned crypto players view memecoins — tokens based on viral internet memes or celebrities — with skepticism.

Eric Trump said memecoins allow investors to directly support their passions and serve as a powerful gateway drawing newcomers into the crypto world.

"If somebody wants to go in and they want to buy $TRUMP, congratulations, now you have access to Bitcoin, you have access to Ethereum, you have access to USD1, you have access to the United States dollar," he said. "You just took the first step in actually creating some financial freedom that I think so many people around the world want."

Musing about the future, Trump posited that lots of real-world assets could benefit from a marriage with crypto. "Why is it that if I wanted to refinance Trump Tower, I couldn't tokenize this asset and put it on the street for billions of people around the world to otherwise invest in it," he said. "They love New York. They love Fifth Avenue. They love Trump."

Write to Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com